HP 840 laptop won't boot without M.2 connected

steinooo · 22 Feb 2017 at 20:16

Hi,

I've an m.2 in my laptop which i'm not using (to my knowledge) as I've a larger SSD. The M.2 is simply a 32GB partition formatted with NTFS in Windows 10. in another laptop, but when I took it out, my 840 G1 laptop wouldn't boot!

HDD is set to AHCI in the BIOS rather than RAID.

tried with and without "boot from M2" BIOS option.

any ideas why my laptop seems to require this M.2 please?

tres_kun · 23 Feb 2017 at 22:23

If you install windows with a second drive present in the machine
It can, will install files on the first drive
In this example M.2
This is what i speculate

steinooo · 24 Feb 2017 at 08:21

Thanks, didn't know that.

Habakkuk · 24 Feb 2017 at 19:18

Your bootloader is likely on the M.2 drive, if you remove it & use a windows cd to repair your installation, it should let you boot without it.

When you add the drive back, you can format it the M.2 drive to remove any lingering boot files.

varkanoid · 28 Feb 2017 at 14:13

Simple question. Where is your Windows folder as you have not said ? Good indication as to where the bootloader is.
If its on the larger SSD then as said probably its booting from the M.2 drive.